Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Outnumber them and we have the guns (October 3rd)

Andrew Breitbart the 42 year old US publisher, conservative commentator and key note speaker for the Tea Party has told an audience in the event of a civil war with liberals, to fire the first shot stating that “We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns.” Addressing a gathering of Tea Party followers who had paid $45 to attend the function in Lexington, Breitbart spoke to the current #occupywallstreet protest, stating “Bring ‘em on!”, then going onto the civil war analogy. “Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.”

Inspired by Tommy Christopher http://ow.ly/6DEeW image source Neon Tommy http://ow.ly/6DEry

Ruled we are the ones who keep governing (September 21st)

Fredrik Reinfeldt the Swedish Prime Minister and leader of the ruling four-party coalition of center-right Moderates, Liberals, Centre Party and Christian Democrats held power after winning re-election albeit losing its outright majority.  The re-election is historical in Sweden’s political history as the first time a non-socialist government has been elected to a second term. Sweden has a cradle-to-grave welfare system that emanated from a long history of socialist governance.  The coalition on this occasion won with 49.3% of the vote, the social democrat coalition with the Left and Green Parties with 43.7%, and the extreme  right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats increasing their percentage to 5.7%, winning for the first time parliamentary representation and the balance of power.

Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist

My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day.  Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age.  The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.

Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness.  The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.  Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.

www.ianbunn.com